6/1/2023 0 Comments Social amnesia jacobyThe turning point, as you can perhaps imagine, is always along the lines of ideology, with the hope of showing how much more critical Lacan’s thought is. Each section of Parker’s book takes Lacan from a perspective that seemingly intersects with his thought-from psychiatry, to psychology, psychotherapy, academia, feminism, religion, and politics- and demonstrates its fundamental divergence. I for one commend Parker for the audacity of bringing this “unfashionable” term back to the table. And yet, one can find in Lacan the hope for something beyond the fantasy of a masterful figure and an attempt to think through this interminable oscillation, something you would imagine to be important for the psychoanalysts who are supposed to be prepared to tackle repetition. We would not be far from the gyrating oscillation that plagued Jacoby. You shall have one.” Revolution for Lacan is only a means of coming full circle-a snake that neurotically eats its own tail. Lacan often bucked when confronted with the revolutionary sentiment in his day- Paris in the 1960s, replete with Debord’s Situationism, intellectual Maoism, structural Marxism, to name a few-most famous of all being his statement in his 1969 seminar to the protestors that had staged an intervention, “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. Revolution is not a word a Lacanian is supposed to use-it’s too political. Ian Parker, it must be said, has failed to earn his badge and has instead written something entirely blasphemous: revolutions in subjectivity? Perhaps one earns one’s Lacanian badge of honor in finding pages worth of things to say about one of his graphs. Not least of these are the books that work on what are called the Lacanian mathemes-the diagrams Lacan presented in his seminars- which one of his early disciples humorously called nothing more than grafitti. With Lacan, more often than not, one finds book upon book treating his work as a rarified abstract system of thought replete with jargon and a slew of repeated mantras. Nonetheless, he, like Freud, has succumbed to the kind of reification that Jacoby wanted to tackle. Lacan, like Freud, was not a thinker devoid of a sense of the social- anything but. What Jacoby did for Freud, I believe Parker does for Lacan. It is precisely for this reason that I find Ian Parker’s new book, Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity, a promising return of Jacoby’s basic premise. Obsolescence, Jacoby remarks, is less about veracity than a constellation of forces which include repression and forgetting usually directed at what is most pressing rather than least. It is this that makes Freud’s work more timeless than so many others, even as it grows increasingly obsolete. For Jacoby, Freud remains the original figure of intellectual resistance, whose work attempts to think through the contradictions of his own time. With the most extreme contradictions threatening the base of psychoanalysis, from calls for more politically viable forms of thought to demands for an evidential base, perhaps we should return to this classic work, which, he says, “is less about political than intellectual resistance, thinking against the grain-an endeavor that remains as urgent as ever” (Jacoby, 1975). While Jacoby’s book may be thought of by some as a classic, this label functions with a double edge-it is classic for its time, 1970s Freudian-Marxism. Psychoanalysis-with its sham innovation and empty psychological categories- blindly works in tandem with the most blatant forms of social injustice. Whatever criticisms of the past we might make, they tend to be fundamentally shallow, betraying what is clearly more an infatuation with an imaginary future of prosperity and progress then any critical understanding of history, no less the history of one’s own discipline. We seem incapable of mounting a resistance to what he calls pseudohistorical consciousness paraded under banners of new radical liberation psychologies, or cries for more and more fetishistic forms of objectivity. In 1997 he said, with a sigh, that we continue the oscillation that has always contributed to the social amnesia he sought to diagnose twenty-two years earlier. When Russell Jacoby wrote a new introduction in 1997 to his classic work from 1975, Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology, and asked himself what had changed, his answer was clear- “absolutely nothing.” In his original work he criticized post-Freudian psychologists and psychoanalysts for gyrating from extreme subjectivism to extreme objectivism, from conservative to reactionary agendas, failing to grasp the social implications of their own thinking with an undue lack of rigor. Reviewed By: Jamieson Webster Lacan Is History
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